Washington DC is in a state of lockdown for the most heavily guarded presidential inauguration in history. Along with the customary inauguration address and parade, a number of protests are being planned in Washington and around the country. We speak with Shahid Buttar, a member of the Guerilla Poetry Insurgency affinity group for the anti-inauguration protests and Mark Goldstone, of the Demonstration Support Committee for the National Lawyers...

We look back at 2004 including the presidential race, the continuing war in Iraq, the U.S.-backed coup in Haiti, the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, the deaths of Ronald Reagan and Yasser Arafat, the catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami and much more. Voices include:

The intelligence reform bill passed by Congress includes little-discussed provisions that would greatly expand the government’s policing power and centralizes the intelligence community’s surveillance powers which civil liberties advocates say increases the likelihood for government abuses. We speak with Robert Dreyfuss of Mother Jones and Timothy Edgar of the ACLU. [includes rush transcript]

As Attorney General John Ashcroft announces his resignation from President Bush’s cabinet, we speak with Georgetown Law School professor David Cole who says Ashcroft has shown a "willful blindness to any concerns about the basic principles that this country was founded upon." [includes rush transcript]

In a Democracy Now! U.S. exclusive, two former intelligence officials from Britain and Denmark discuss why they blew the whistle on their governments in relation to the war in Iraq. Katharine Gun is a former British employee who leaked details of a secret U.S. spy operation on UN Security Council members in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Major Frank Grevil is a former military intelligence officer from Denmark who was fired for leaking...

Salman Rushdie, one of the most highly acclaimed writers in the world, discusses the Bush administration, civil liberties and war in a rare appearance in New York. Rushdie was forced into hiding and lived underground for many years after Iran issued a fatwa calling for his death following the publication of his controversial novel The Satanic Verses. [includes rush transcript]